Statement of Heidi Goldsmith, Executive Director, Coalition for Residential Education, Silver Spring, Maryland

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support
of the House Committee on Ways and Means

May 23, 2006

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee,

On behalf of CORE: the Coalition for Residential Education, let me express our greatest appreciation for your openness to considering ways to improve the lives of children in the child welfare system, and for mandating, in the proposed legislation, Section 422, Clause 4A, to “expand and strengthen the range of existing services...to improve child outcomes.”

These children deserve the best.  They deserve what we want for our own children.

My name is Heidi Goldsmith.  I am Founder and Executive Director of CORE: the Coalition for Residential Education, a national non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and assisting the development of residential schools for disadvantaged children and youth.   For twelve years we have been helping communities across the country open new boarding schools and children’s homes.  Boarding schools such as San Pasqual Academy in San Diego, opened in 2001 through a public-private partnership that serves teenagers exclusively in the foster care system.  CORE formed and guides an association among the approximately 100 existing programs, created and urges adoption of a set of national quality standards for residential living, promotes the sharing and adoption of promising practices among the programs, and has begun a research agenda on these living and learning environments for young people from severely troubled homes. 

The number of new residential education programs in development, and existing programs now wanting to also serve children in the foster care system because it fits their mission to serve the neediest young people, is slowly but surely growing.  Currently, approximately 23% of the students in our program are from the foster care system, and another 12% were homeless when they entered our programs.  But we NEED your assistance to overcome the barriers we too often face.

“Residential education” is an umbrella term for an out-of-home setting where a person both lives and learns.  It encompasses boarding schools, ‘prep’ schools, residential charter schools, orphanages, children’s villages, and youth academies serving basically healthy children from economically and socially disadvantaged homes. In these 24-hour educational, future-focused settings students are fed, receive a quality education, live in a safe environment, and can take advantage of sports teams, computer clubs, arts, leadership programs, community service, and more.  They learn social skills such as conflict resolution, have positive adult role models, and gain a positive sense of what their lives can be.  Values and lessons learned are consistent 24 hours a day – what is taught in the classroom is reinforced in the dorms or cottages, and vice versa. Siblings, even large sibling groups, can remain together. The average length of stay, by DESIGN, is over two years – much longer than an emergency shelter or group home. The children see these places as a “second home,” and not yet one more short-term program to quickly go in and out of.  As a result, there are a reduced number of placements for children in the foster care system who are served in these settings, and their education is more consistent, leading to better life outcomes.  Your leadership is needed to make this a more widely available option.

The prevailing philosophy, and the proposed legislation, contends that children are best raised in safe, loving FAMILIES.  Unfortunately, the children we are concerned about do not have these families.  What they need now, though, is not what LOOKS like a family.  What they need is what BEHAVES like a safe, loving family.  They need both physical and emotional safety, stability, and positive adults to support and genuinely care for them.  This is, I believe, the intent of those who drafted the proposed legislation.  These elements are provided in quality residential education programs.  I urge you to add the residential education alternative to the scarce choices available to children in the foster care system, especially older children.  This option needs to be made clearly and explicitly available to judges, social workers, and other child advocates who are often at wits end to provide wholesome environments for these children.  This would be wise policy and wise law.

I contend that residential education is, first, an effective option, which we need to expand.  Although the effectiveness of residential education for youth in foster care has not yet been evaluated formally, we have basic statistics:  Despite the vast majority of the students coming from low income, and abusive/neglectful backgrounds, 79.5% of the 2005 graduates of CORE Member programs enrolled in college, and another 5% enlisted in the military.

My second contention is that residential education is a cost-effective option.  On the surface, residential education is more expensive than basic traditional foster care.  It is approximately $35,000 per child per year, including their residential living, education, medical care, after-school activities, counseling, etc.  This is less than half the cost of most juvenile delinquency facilities, where many of these kids are likely to end up without significant intervention. It is also a third to a fifth of the cost of residential treatment centers or psychiatric treatment programs, which are short-term, intensive, and focus on the youth’s pathology.  Unfortunately, many children from abusive living situations are inappropriately placed in these settings because of the lack of these less restrictive, less expensive choices.  The other reason this is an EXTREMELY cost-effective alternative for tax-payers is that the vast majority of the costs of caring for these children is paid by private donors.  Billions ofprivate dollars are invested in these children through these settings.  Many programs, such as the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, Happy Hill Farm Academy in Texas, Oklahoma Baptist Children’s Homes, and the Glenwood School in Chicago, don’t accept a penny of public funds.  In our most recent survey of residential education programs, we foundthat only 12% of the funding for our member programs came from public funds.  

We are in favor of a range of options, as we know one size does not fit all.  We greatly support family preservation when it is in the best interest of the children to preserve the family, and when a reasonable intervention with the family is all that is needed. Our programs help families preserve ties with their children in a variety of ways.  All of our members have programs to keep family members and guardians involved, because that is effective in helping the children.  Many of the programs also run foster care programs, adoption programs, family preservation programs, and more.  When children’s home environments become healthy enough for them to return, they may do so. We are also in favor of adoption.  I am a proud adoptive parent myself.  Realistically, though, not all children in foster care whose parental rights have been terminated want to be, or are, adopted. 

Residential education programs were prevalent in the U.S. until the late 1960’s.  With the advent of “deinstitutionalization,” most were closed, or transformed into intensive residential “treatment” centers or juvenile delinquency facilities. Until seven years ago, most of the surviving 30 or so programs were funded under private auspices.  Many still are entirely privately funded, such as the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania with a $7 billion endowment.  Recently, there has been a dramatic resurgence of interest in opening new programs – both privately funded and through public/private partnerships, particularly residential charter schools.  As with all charter schools, funds for the educational components come from existing public education dollars.  Residential components are funded by a combination of existing public dollars and private donations.

Parents who live in nice, safe neighborhoods and have the financial means often send their children, with pride, to residential preparatory (“prep”) schools.  Children from abusive or neglectful homes rarely have that choice. Yet they need this choice most. 

This choice is especially appropriate for teenagers, which is one of the groups that the 2002 Child and Family Services Reviews found most lacking in appropriate or sufficient services. All of our programs serve teens.  The majority also serve younger children.  From a youth development standpoint, teenagers fit well into a peer group setting. At this age, they are busy defining themselves and separating themselves from their parents and home, building their own unique identity, finding a peer group, maturing, and structuring themselves outside of their family.  Most youth begin to measure themselves against authorities in their lives.  Removing a child from his/her home and placing him/her with another family is always a challenge.  However, removing a teen and placing him/her with another family can be even more of a challenge.  The teen already has trouble accepting “parental” authority, as a natural part of human development. Now, he/she is forced to blend into the new family, with their unique norms and expectations, while the normal human development phase at this time of life is to separate from a family.  It puts the foster family into a difficult situation: trying to work with a youth who is trying to separate from parents. 

In a residential education program, youth are put into peer groups, with adult models of identification who are not trying to compete as parents with the youth’s own parents.  Two thirds of our programs utilize married couples who live with six to ten youth in beautiful single family homes. Others use single Resident Assistants, as in many New England prep schools.  Youth are worked with both as individuals and as part of a group.  Independent living skills are taught and facilitated.  Residential education programs continue to offer their young people support after graduation, through college scholarships and security deposits for apartments, continued adult contact with them, and homecomings.  Many programs also offer alumni housing for the youth until they finish college or have saved enough from their first jobs to live on their own.

Despite some of the public perceptions of “institutions,” residential education environments are safe, educative, and open young people’s horizons. They encourage them to achieve as we would want our own children to achieve.  Yet, some people oppose this option for children, clinging to old images of warehouses for children in England over a hundred years ago.  What a loss to everyone if this perception is allowed to sway public policy.  And in some cases, despite a complete lack of empirical data about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of residential education, those promoting this old image are winning.  Recently, consent decrees signed in Tennessee and Georgia have precluded children from foster care to be served in these settings.  Dozens of residential education programs have been shut down as a result.  Negotiations are now in the courts in Mississippi and Nebraska, and we expect the spread of lawsuits to continue.

We need the law to be sufficiently specific to give clear guidance to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and to the States about what the overarching public policy is in this matter.  Let us not leave it to opinion.  Let us please be clear in the statute that there will be an expansion of competent, qualified, and cost-effective service options, including residential education.  Our programs will work with the states to meet their reasonable requirements.

I personally was inspired to make the residential education option available for at-risk youth in the U.S. after seeing Israel’s 70-year old network of children and youth villages.  There they tell the children, “What your family cannot do for you, your community will.”  We can, and need to, do this here.

Legislative action is needed to:

• Recognize residential education as a distinct and valid designation for children in the foster care system, asseparate from other short-term residential options such as emergency shelters, group homes, and treatment centers; 
• Fund the study and evaluation of this re-emerging field; and
• Appropriate funds to jump start new residential schools, as was done with charter schools

Let us give these young people the opportunities they deserve. The residential education option for youth transcends partisan politics, as with charter schools. Thank you for your openness to considering additional options for children in the child welfare system.  I believe you will find, as a result, improved outcomes for children -- who are, after all, our future.